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The week in Intel: Conroe, ultraportable plans for 2006

More details of Intel's 2006 plans are starting to trickle out to the press.

Intel's Yonah—currently going by the names Core Duo and Core Solo—is the last gasp of the classic Pentium M architecture. It's destined to be replaced next year by a successor, the Merom architecture, which is the microarchitecture that Intel will eventually unify its entire x86 product line on. Some recent news out of Intel sheds more light on the exact timing of the Conroe transition, as well as giving some hints of what may be in the pipeline from some of Intel's OEMs, Apple included.

Details of Intel's 2006 roadmap are starting to trickle out to the press. The roadmap shows a slow rollout of Conroe over the course of the last half of 2006, starting with the processor's planned introduction in Q3 (it may slip into early Q4). Intel expects Conroe's mainstream desktop market share to be at 10 percent by the end of Q3, and somewhere just under 20 percent by the end of the year.

According to some reports, Conroe will debut at a range of clock speeds, topping out at 2.66GHz. The naming convention for Conroe parts will be on the pattern "Core E6x00," where the "E" signifies the processor's voltage range (over 50 watts, in this case), and the digit following the six is a general performance indicator. So the US$209 Core E6300 is a 1.86GHz part with a 2MB L2 that's aimed at the middle of the mainstream market segment, while the US$530 Core E6700 is a 2.66 GHz part with a 4MB L2 intended for the performance segment.

At the highest end of the desktop market will be the Conroe XE (Extreme Edition), about which almost nothing is known at this time other than that it is eXtreme.

If you're holding out for Conroe, you'll also want to hold off on a motherboard purchase. The current batch of 975-based motherboards will not work with Conroe, even though the 975 chipset itself is Conroe-compatible. Conroe will require an updated voltage regulation module (VRM), the specs of which haven't yet been released. Future motherboards with an updated, Conroe-ready VRM will be backwards compatible with existing processors.

The mobile market will see the introduction of Merom at some point in Q4. A report from the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona indicates that Intel will push OEMs to squeeze Merom into super-small subnotebooks, like the Toshiba Libretto. Rumors and wishful thinking have Apple developing just such an ultraportable, possibly for a hypothetical April 1 launch event celebrating the company's 30th birthday.